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Phishing and spyware are hammering medium to small businesses, according to a
new study.
”Medium and smaller businesses have lower access to expertise,” says
Bob Hansmann, a senior manager for Trend Micro, Inc., a security company
based in Tokyo and with U.S. headquarters in Cuptertino, Calif. ”The
greater access you have to expertise, the better prepared you are.
Otherwise, there might be someone in the company who reads up on it and
runs with the first solution they come across so they can move on to the
next problem.”
The study, which was done by Trend Micro, shows that organizations
lacking IT departments are clearly experiencing increasing problems with
security threats — from spam to spyware to phishing. For respondents
from small- and medium-sized businesses that have IT support, 38 percent
in the United States; 30 percent in Japan, and 44 percent in Germany said
they had contacted IT about a security concern or breach within the past
three months.
The findings spotlight the challenge smaller organizations face in
scaling IT resources to provide technical advice, conduct system scans,
clean machines manually, deploy patches and security policies, and
educate staff in order to enable a secure working environment, according
to Trend Micro analysts.
Hansmann, in a one-on-one interview with eSecurityPlanet, notes
that the study also shows that 46 percent of small to medium business
customers reported having problems with spyware, while 35 percent of
enterprise customers reported the same. Hansmann also notes that these
numbers closely correlate with the statistics that show that 54 percent
of small- and medium-sized businesses have an IT staff, while 91 percent
of enterprise customers have their own staffs.
But Hansmann says there’s another aspect to spyware and phishing that is
making the threats harder to deal with.
”It’s the newness of the problem,” he explains. ”These are emerging
threats. The old problems, like viruses and even spam, have been around
for a while. But the new problems that are only about a year old… it
contributes to the expertise problem. The problems are new. The solutions
are new. They don’t have experts in house.”
